Saturday, May 21, 2011

Pachinko


At various times in Japan I was taken to play Pachinko. This seemingly innocuous game of chance is a national pastime, along with getting drunk and falling asleep in front of the TV, and the palaces constructed to house its machines are truly breathtaking examples of....I don't know, I can't tell you because there's nothing else on Earth like them. 
Huge edifices of glass and chrome, they resemble giant Wurlitzers, with myriad flashing neon tubes and sparkling globes blazing with pulsating light against the glowing night sky. Pachinko parlors are often three or four stories high and contain not only the machine hall but accommodation for their fairly extensive staff, along with other offices and rooms. Those built on cheaper land on the outskirts of towns also have vast parking lots, and thus several acres of land are often devoted to a game whose actual playing space is six square feet. 
Some of the exteriors have themes, like 'Space Travel' or 'The Wild West' but they are all visually hideous in a way that only modern materials and electricity wastage on a grand scale can achieve. Driving through the countryside at night, a big parlor's lights can be detected as a multi-colored glow on the horizon from miles away, like a cruise liner exclusively for retiree carnival workers, with some establishments even playing searchlights onto the underside of the clouds to guide the witless to the fount. 
Pachinko, as you all know, is basically vertical bagatelle. It is played on a machine with a flat screen inches from the player's nose, behind which is a gaily-printed board studded with thousands of pins. Japanese people call it 'pinball', but unlike that game there are no flippers with which one might influence the course of the ball. Through the forest of pins tumble little stainless steel balls that bounce around a bit before falling into oblivion at the bottom. Lurking here and there on the playfield are little trap doors that occasionally pop open for a brief period and allow any ball that enters to win a prize - more balls. The player sits bolt upright like an attentive zombie in front of the machine, controlling the inflow of balls with a small dial to his right. That's it. The machines are arranged in long rows and people sit back-to-back in the narrow alleyways between them. 
Technically, you can't win anything more exciting than snacks or soft toys, but - and here’s a curious thing - near every parlor there is a little hole in the wall behind which is a generous person who will buy your hard-earned trinkets for huge wads of cash. Don’t do the obvious thing and buy something from a toy shop in the hope that you’ll make a profit on it at the hole in the wall, though - for some reason, they only buy things won at Pachinko. Isn’t that odd? Gambling on Pachinko is actually illegal, so these two businesses can surely not be connected.
The atmosphere in a Pachinko parlor is dominated by noise and light; there is the rushing and clattering of the machines themselves, a constant blare of music (often stirring military marches when the DJ senses people are tiring), bells and sirens that indicate wins and the frenzied yelling of announcers over ultra-loud PA systems. The announcers keep up a running commentary on who is winning, what time it is and so on. It's truly deafening, and this assault on the ears is matched by the garish, multi-coloured neon lighting that sears the eyeballs even as you walk past outside. Pachinko parlors are hot and cramped, everyone smokes like crazy and even a few minutes' play can lose you considerable sums of money. For anyone interested in trying it, the overall effect can be simulated by standing in a foundry in mid-shift with lit cigarettes up your nose while someone shines car headlights into your eyes and you feed a stream of coins into a toilet. 
It is occasionally possible to win money at Pachinko, and "professional" players exist in sufficient numbers for specialist magazines to be published describing new machines and parlors, but the fact that the owners all drive the ubiquitous Mercedes and are able to pay the overheads (I once tried to count the neon tubes in a single parlor; I gave up at 800 when I couldn't see properly any more, which at 60 watts a tube lit ten hours a day means a heck of an electricity bill) suggests it's a mug's game. At the end of each day, after the doors close, professional pin-benders open the machines and carefully bend the pins in such a way that it will perform differently the next day. This makes it impossible for a pro to home in again on a winning machine.

Ask the average Japanese adult if they play pachinko and they'll either wrinkle up their noses in distaste or grudgingly admit "sometimes". A great many do, however - between a quarter and a third of the population, according to a recent newspaper survey - and large groups of would-be zombies queue up, waiting for parlors to open in the mornings. 

There are many theories, the favorite being release of stress by self-hypnosis with flashing lights and so on, but if you ask me it is just a refuge for poor fools who don't want to be left alone with their thoughts (or families) for even a minute. Like other bizarre aspects of Japanese life (the matt black buses and trucks, for example, that are garlanded with Imperial flags and driven slowly round crowded inner-city areas while the fascist bastards inside yell messages of race hatred and mortal devotion to the emperor at volumes above the pain threshold through speakers on the roof utterly unmolested by the police, one of whom once gave me a sanctimonious lecture about freedom of speech when I complained that they were rattling my windows) pachinko is accepted as normal simply because no-one has ever thought to question it. Social commentators in the media, of course, are far too busy criticizing the West for its frivolity and wasting of natural resources.

One last thing about Pachinko. A few years back the North Koreans launched a ballistic missile clean over Japan into the Pacific. The Japanese air defense forces were caught on the hop, and the defense minister wasn’t told until the following day. North Korean TV, meanwhile, was regaling the masses with footage of the liftoff backed with commentary by the same mad quacking woman who announces each new triumph of the Workers’ Paradise. At the same time, their representatives reassured the world that what they’d seen was actually a satellite launch (They said that they’d launched a satellite to broadcast patriotic songs. NASA have been unable to find it, and the fact that the songs are being broadcast intermittently on long wave suggests that someone may not be telling the entire truth. The model the North Koreans proudly displayed on the TV news was of a football painted white to represent the Earth surrounded by a ring of bent coat hanger wire, along which a tin can painted silver progressed in a series of jerks. They’d presumably spent all their money on the rocket.) It’s the last outpost of Stalinism, is North Korea, a darkened land of third-generation indoctrination run by a cunning elite who skillfully play the nuclear blackmail card to get food and cash out of the West, while denouncing their benefactors in bloodcurdling terms and letting their own population starve. Many Japanese have a basic loathing of communism anyway, and fear North Korea as an unstable geopolitical time bomb. All the odder, then, that they go and play Pachinko at all - because a large proportion of the parlors are run by North Koreans, who channel the profits directly back to their homeland.

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